The science of nonsense

THERE is a silver lining to the coronavirus fiasco, which is that the public can now see that there is no such thing as ‘the science is settled’, as the man-made climate change brigade parrot at every opportunity.

The computer model devised by Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London has been torn to shreds. Other teams who ran it found that identical inputs resulted in different results, and that running the code on different computers changed the results. They warned the Ferguson team, who were not interested. One expert has speculated that they simply averaged the results of multiple runs to cover up the variation. Imperial, we should remember, is ranked ninth best in the world in the 2020 QS World University Rankings and tenth best in the 2020 Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

This was the crack team to which the bewildered government turned for advice, yet their ‘science’ appears to be have been little better than you or I could have managed.

Why should it be any different for the ‘science’ of climate change? The Conservative Woman has carried many rebuttals of claims by the man-made climate change lobby which are provable rubbish. Surely now there must be some scepticism?

There are two problems. First, there are none so deaf as those who do not want to hear. For a lot of activists, the cause is their life. Their social sphere consists solely of those with the same views. Casting those views aside would mean turning their lives upside down. My guess is that the social side is more important for many activists than the facts of the case, and they are not willing to listen to any arguments which might destroy that.

The second problem is money. Research scientists do not work for nothing: they depend on grants either from industry or government. Grants are not dispensed impartially: they are given to those who will try to come up with a desired result. If a government is convinced that black is white, the available research funding will go to scientists submitting projects aligned with that idea. If halfway through you have to admit that you are not making much progress, and that in fact you tend to the view that black is black, you may as well forget about the second half of your grant. In this case, as could be seen when senior politicians fawned over St Greta (remind yourselves with this embarrassing picture) the government has accepted that climate change, which has happened continuously over the Earth’s 4.5billion-year existence, can and should be reversed. King Canute! thou shouldst be living at this hour!

The cards have been stacked for some time in favour of the green mob. Maybe Neil Ferguson’s demonstration of the explosive effect on a reputation of spouting nonsense will give some pause for thought.

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Margaret Ashworth is a retired national newspaper journalist. She runs the Subbing Clinic
in a hopeless attempt to keep up standards, and co-runs A & M Records where she indulges her passion for 60s pop.